Notable Faculty & Student Achievements

August 2019

Part-Time Instructor of Applied MusicAdrienne Inglis’s composition “The Song of the Harp Seal” will enjoy its world premiere performance by Inversion Ensemble Coda August 10–11, 2019, in Georgetown and Austin, TX. Composed especially for Inversion Ensemble Coda, “The Song of the Harp Seal” sets to music Gillean McDougall’s poem of the same title and was commissioned by the composer for this project. For treble chorus and harp, this work tells the story of a mother harp seal and her pup forced south of their usual arctic range by the climate crisis. The pup ingests plastic pollution which contributes to her death near the shores of the Isle of Skye. Scottish legend mixes with modern tragedy as mermaids beckon in Gaelic to the harp pup and summon the audience to remember the harp seal. Inversion Ensemble’s project “Aether: Earth—Conservation/Nature” features guest conductor Cina Crisara and Chaski harpist Shana Norton.

An excerpt of Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’s opera The Color of Dissonance was included in the 10th edition of Nancy Rogers and Robert Ottman’s Music for Sight Singing (Pearson, 2019).

July 2019

Part-Time Assistant Professor of MusicHai Zheng Olefsky was invited to give a cello master class and perform a solo and chamber music in concert with violin virtuoso Elizabeth Pitcairn atLuzerne Chamber Music Festival’s Legacy Concerton July 21, 2019. Luzerne Music Center (LMC) aims to provide world-class music instruction for passionate young people in a summer-camp environment regardless of their financial circumstances. Musicians ages nine to 18 come from all over the world to train at LMC’s campus, which is located in the foothills of New York City’s Adirondack Park.

June 2019

Part-Time Instructor of Applied MusicAdrienne Inglis’s composition “The Rage and Reconciliation of King Lear” will enjoy its world première performance by Inversion Ensemble June 1–2, 2019, in Austin, TX. Commissioned by Jonathan Riemer in memory of his father, Rev. Dr. Milton H. Riemer, the work for mixed chorus, bassoon, and piano weaves passages from Shakespeare’sKing Lear with the signature phrases of Rev. Dr. Riemer. Rev. Dr. Riemer’s words bring insight and reflection to the poignant narrative of a parent–child relationship and mental illness. Inversion Ensemble’s project “Heroes/Monsters: Songs of Legends and Beasts” features bassoonist Nathan Koch and pianist Austin Haller.

Professor of MusicLois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) on May 18, 2019, in its annual Paint to Music Spring Concert, which features artwork created by Austin ISD students in response to hearing and studying an iconic piece of classical music. This year’s selection wasPictures at an Exhibitionby Modest Moussorgsky (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel). Also featured on the program was “Festive Overture” by Dmitri Shostakovich, the “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (conducted byGus Sterneman ’06), and the “Concerto for Horn and Orchestra in B-Flat Major, Op. 91” by Reinhold Glière (performed by ACO member Chris Simpson).

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde has published a review of Prefab Sprout’s recording “I Trawl The Megahertz” in the College Music Symposium (spring 2019, vol. 59, no.1).

April 2019

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Voice Julia Taylor performed the role of Mimi in the all-female production of Puccini’s La Boheme (La Femme Boheme) with Local Opera Local Artists (LOLA) at the Women’s Music, Diversity, and Leadership Conference at San Diego State University.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Concert CellistHai Zheng Olefsky has been invited to be an adjudicator for strings and to give two cello master classes April 11–12 at the 2019 Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) Arts Festival in Austin, TX. This Festival has grown to be the nation’s premiere annual regional arts festival among independent schools. The festival is a collaborative enterprise with more than 40 participating schools. For more than 50 years, the ISAS Fine Arts Festival has been a celebration of the visual and performing arts, bringing together thousands of students who will share their talents and be inspired for their futures.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of MusicMichael Cooper gave a guest lecture titled “The Silence of Florence Price” at Trinity University on April 2. The talk featured recordings by award-winning pianists Lara Downes and Petronel Malan of five still-unpublished piano compositions by Florence Price (1887–1953). Cooper called for a more intersectional and sustained exploration of the composer’s life and works. Those interested may find the narcolepsy-inducing abstracthere.

March 2019

Professor of MusicLois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) on March 26, 2019, in its annual Texas Rising Stars (TRS) concert. The TRS performance is presented in collaboration with the Butler School of Music (BSOM) at the University of Texas at Austin and highlights winners of the BSOM string concerto competition. Also featured was the Amster String Quartet, an ensemble of high-school musicians nominated by their teachers and then auditioned by the ACO for the honor of being coached by a noted local music teacher (this year’s teacher was Dick Frazier at Anderson High School). Every year, a different ensemble is assembled and coached on a rotating basis (woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, etc.). The ACO was also honored to present the U.S. premiere of Roydon Tse’sSinfonia Concertante, which won the ACO’s biannual composition contest.

Music Literature majorKatiebeth Brandt ’19 prepared a critical edition and arranged for the posthumous premiere of Florence B. Price’s choral composition titled “Bluebell.” Based on a text by Mary Rolofson Gamble, the work was performed on March 3 at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Brandt prepared her edition under the supervision of Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine ArtsMichael Cooper. The autograph was obtained from the University of Arkansas Special Collections Library and has aprofessional recording and videomade from the premiere. This piece was written by a woman, with a woman poet, edited by a woman, with a treble section of eight women voices, conducted by a woman with a woman accompanist.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied MusicAdrienne Inglis’s composition “Asleep in a Blanket Spun of Energy” enjoyed its world premiere performance by Inversion Ensemble on March 2 and 3, 2019, in Austin, TX. Honoring Inglis’s Ojibwe ancestors, the work for mixed chorus and Trevor Shaw’s electronic track evokes the vivid imagery of Margaret Noodin’s poem “We Are Returning Always.” The piece sets all of the English text and a few key words of the Anishinaabemowin text from the bilingual poem, which beautifully captures a glimpse into the natural and celestial wonders of the Ojibwe world. The music reflects a taste of the syncopated embellished singing, pentatonic melodies, and steady drumbeat characteristic of Ojibwe music. The electronic track provides both a compelling rhythmic foundation and fantastical sonic representations of the moon, nebulae, supernovae, the aurora borealis, and the forests of the Ojibwe lands.

February 2019

Sphinx Organization Laureate Lara Downes gave the world premieres of two major compositions by Florence Price discovered and edited by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooperin a major concert on Feb. 23. The concert, part of the Washington (DC) Performing Arts series, previewed Downes’s new project, Holes in the Sky (Sony Masterworks, March 1). The album, a genre-fluid collaboration with Judy Collins, Rhiannon Giddens, and others, is devoted exclusively to music by women, performed exclusively by women. Along with other pieces, Downes performed Price’s “Fantasie Nègre no. 2,” long believed lost before Cooper recovered it, as well as her more compact “Sketches in Sepia” and “Memory Mist.” All three compositions typify Price’s creative synthesis of African-American stylistic traits with the genres and techniques of concert music.

A concert aria by Felix Mendelssohn, discovered by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine ArtsMichael Cooper,received its Puerto Rican premiere in performances by theInternational Chamber Orchestra of Puerto Ricowith soprano Sara Garcia under the direction of Emilio Colón on February 8–10 in Mayagüez and San Juan. The 14-minute aria, “Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, età dell’ oro, MWV H 4” (1834), was long assumed to be a draft for a different piece written nine years later, but Cooper’s research into the manuscripts, text, and music revealed it to be an autonomous composition—resulting in the addition of a major “new” composition to the catalog of Mendelssohn’s works and the repertoire of nineteenth-century vocal music.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine ArtsMichael Cooper uncovered and edited a composition by Florence B. Price titled “Memory Mist,” which was performed on Feb. 1 by Grammy-nominated pianist and Sphinx Organization Laureate Lara Downes as part of Detroit Public Radio’s celebration of the first day of African-American history month. The piece is part of Cooper’s large-scale project exploring the hundreds of unknown compositions by Price, who, despite her sex and race, was acclaimed as the mid-20th century’s leading African-American composer of concert music. The performance will be rebroadcast by Detroit Public Radio after Feb. 23 and will be one of the featured tracks on Downes’s new genre-fluid CDHoles in the Sky, devoted exclusively to music by women composers and performers (due for release on March 1).

January 2019

Visiting Assistant Professor of MusicBeth Everett presented a session at the National Opera Association national conference titled “Female Conductors and Directors and Their Paths to Careers in Opera.” The conference took place on Jan. 3–5, 2019, in Salt Lake City, UT.

Professor of MusicLois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra on Dec. 2, 2018, in a concert titledBohemian Rhapsodies. The concert featured guest violist Roger Myers and music by Czech composers Dvorak, Stamitz, Husa, and Smetana.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied MusicAdrienne Inglis’s composition “Innocent Blood” was part of the Inversion Ensemble’s “I, Too, Sing America” performance, which was just selected byThe Austin Chronicle as one of Robert Faires’sTop 10 Dance and Classical Joys of 2018. Faires describes the performance as “a history lesson through choral music, speaking to struggles present and past (e.g., witch trials in Adrienne Inglis’s forceful “Innocent Blood”), with the choir’s united voices ever a symbol ofe pluribus unum.”

December 2018

Six music majors have prepared source-critical editions of unknown, unpublished, or little-known works by African American composer Florence B. Price (1887–1953) for the Music in the United States course offered by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine ArtsMichael Cooper. The editions were prepared from autographs held at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and include a scholarly preface, a source-critical score of the work, and a critical report. The students have gone through the entire process of preparing scholarly editions, including finding the sources, requesting reproductions and agreeing to the holding library’s terms, researching the poets and texts (where applicable), inputting the music using professional music-editing software, and assembling the final product. They hold the copyright on their editions. The students, works, and work-statuses are

November 2018

Part-Time Instructor of Applied MusicKatherine Altobello was the guest mezzo-soprano soloist in Austin Chamber Ensemble’s productionA Haunted Evening,featuring works by Brahms, Strauss, Verdi, Britten, Wildhorn, Schwartz, and Sondheim. Altobello performed alongside soprano June Julian, tenor Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, and pianists Dr. Stephen Burnaman and Martha Mortensen Ahern. Performances were on Oct. 19 at Huston–Tillotson University’s King Seabrook Chapel (celebrating their second season as an “all-Steinway” music school) and on Oct. 20 at the First Presbyterian Church in Austin. Performances included solos, duets, trios, and piano movements that fit the Halloween spirit.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper uncovered, edited, and arranged for the posthumous premiere of two unpublished songs by African-American composer and civil-rights activist Margaret A. Bonds (1913–1972). The songs are based on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (1892–1950) sonnets “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” and “I Know My Mind and I Have Made My Choice.” Millay’s poems, considered among the finest sonnets of the 20th century, are important for their use of feminist themes, which Bonds in turn engages in the works’ musical style. The works received their modern premiere at a recital by former Southwestwestern Instructor of Music Dana Long Zenobi at Butler University, Nov. 6, 2018.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine ArtsMichael Cooper discovered and edited an unpublished choral work by Florence B. Price (1887–1953) that will be performed by Visiting Assistant Professor of MusicBeth Everett and the Southwestern University Chorale at their concert on Nov. 3, 2018. The composition, titled “Night,” is based on a poem first published in 1930 in the NAACP journalThe Crisis by Harlem Renaissance author Bessie Mayle. Price, generally acclaimed as the doyenne of African-American concert music of the mid-20th century, set Mayle’s poem to music in 1945. After her setting was premiered in Chicago, the autograph was filed among Price’s other manuscripts. Cooper discovered it during his research in the summer of 2018.

October 2018

Faculty members from the Department of Music were well represented at the annual meeting of the College Music Society, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Oct. 10–13.

Professor of MusicKiyoshi Tamagawa presented his paper “Ragtime, Gamelan, and the Music of Claude Debussy: Exoticism vs. Cultural Appropriation.”

Associate Professors of Music David Asbury andBruce Cain performed three songs composed by Associate Professor of MusicJason Hoogerhyde from theRiver of Words Project.The River of Wordsis a collection of songs the duo has commissioned from multiple composers, setting texts written by children on the topic of the environment.

Professor of MusicLois Ferrari celebrated her 16th consecutive appointment as music director of the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) by opening the 2018–19 season on Oct. 6 with a concert titledBella Italia! Guest trumpeter and Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Kyle Koronka joined the ACO in a concert that featured music by Italian composers Vivaldi, Puccini, Verdi, Rossini, and Respighi.

Part-time Instructor of Applied MusicAdrienne Inglis’ composition “Innocent Blood” will soon enjoy its world première performance by Inversion Ensemble. Mary Esty, the composer’s eighth-great-grandmother, was falsely accused of witchcraft and hanged September 22, 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts. Using poetry, court records, Mary’s petition from prison, and Puritan hymns, “Innocent Blood” tells her tragic story in this work for mezzo-soprano soloist, chorus, flute and bass flute, and organ. The performance will be hosted Oct. 6, 2018, at 7 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, and Oct. 7, 2018, at 3 p.m. at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

Part-time Instructor of Applied MusicKatherine Altobello was the featured mezzo-soprano vocalist for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas, led by Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona of Saint Mary Cathedral and accompanied by Dr. Maimy Fong, an independent music director.